Highlights - Nina Hall - Author of “Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era”


"There's a couple of reasons I think that it slipped attention. Partly because International Relations has tended to focus on large professionalized international NGOs, groups that many of your listeners are probably familiar with, like Greenpeace, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, but in being focused on those now well-established professional NGOs, our scholarship had missed, in my view, the rise of new forms of organization, which the digital era had enabled. So scholars since the nineties had written about how digital communications could be useful for sharing messages and tactics between different activists around the world, but they hadn't asked how is it going to change the very form? The very organizational structure, and this is where I think political communications scholars who really got interested in digital technology and how it was shaping political communications had done some writing and they had spelled out the ways that we were seeing new, what they called hybrid forms of organization that were blurring the boundaries between social movements or media or political parties."